Prince Philippe, Duke of Orleans (1869-1926)

Prince Philippe, Duke of Orleans (6 February 1869-28 March 1926) was the Orleanist claimant to the throne of France from 1894 to 1926, succeeding Prince Philippe, Count of Paris and preceding Jean d'Orleans, Duc de Guise.

Biography
Philippe de Orleans was born at York House in Twickenham, Middlesex, England on 6 February 1869, the son of the exiled French Orleanist pretender Prince Philippe, Count of Paris and the great-grandson of Louis Philippe I. In 1871, the family returned to France following Napoleon III's downfall during the Franco-Prussian War; in 1886, the family was once again forced to take refuge in England when the French Third Republic exiled the Orleanists. Philippe was created Duke of Orleans by his father in 1880, and, in 1887, he graduated from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and entered the British Army, serving as a sub-lieutenant in British India. In 1889, he fathered an illegitimate child during an affair with an actress at a casino in Lausanne, Switzerland, and, in 1890, he was arrested after illegally returning to France. He was expelled back to Switzerland after a few months, and, that same year, he toured several American Civil War battle sites in the United States; he also failed to join the Imperial Russian Army. In 1894, he joined the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars, and, that same year, his father's death led to Philippe becoming the new Orleanist claimant to the French throne. In 1898, he narrowly missed an anarchist assassination attempt in Geneva; Empress Elisabeth of Austria was killed instead. In 1900, Philippe moved his primary residence to Belgium, and he became an avid yachtsman, sailing to Greenland, Siberia, the Arctic Ocean, and Mexico. During World War I, both the French and Belgian armies rejected his services, and, after he was knocked down by a bus, he was also rejected by the Royal Italian Army. In 1926, he died of pneumonia at the Palais d'Orleans in Palermo, Sicily.